In keeping with the Prison Policy Institute, the US has a better incarceration fee per 100,000 individuals in its inhabitants than another NATO nation and it’s even increased than the following 5 member states mixed (the UK, Portugal, Canada, France and Belgium).
So what’s the answer? Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator from Yemen, claims he’s obtained it in an interview with Wired: construct a digital jail as an alternative. He’s not speaking about stapling a bunch of Meta Quest 3’s to prisoners’ heads for years at a time, however it’s additionally not far off from that idea.
Al-Ghaili is proposing a brand new neurological jail system that he calls Cognify. He posted a proposal video of the digital justice system on his Instagram and YouTube channel and it seems downright horrifying.
Right here’s how Cognify works in a theoretical nutshell — As an alternative of locking prisoners up for lengthy durations of time, prisoners can be subjected to synthetic recollections in a digital atmosphere. The system creates personalized AI-generated content material that’s transformed to visible info and delivered to the prisoner’s mind in addition to the components of their DNA and RNA linked to reminiscence formation to ascertain a long run reminiscence sample.
At the moment, such know-how doesn’t exist and Cognify is simply a proposal. Nonetheless, Al-Ghaili claims that experiments performed on animals show this course of may work on people sooner or later sooner or later. As an example, a research revealed in March within the scientific journal Nature in March that used mice as its take a look at topics discovered that recollections are probably shaped by damaged and repaired strands of DNA.
In fact, there are moral implications and results that might have to be addressed if such a system have been to turn out to be a actuality. Al-Ghaili says Cognify may occur inside a decade from now however solely “if we may overcome the moral restrictions that restrict testing such know-how.”
If that doesn’t ship a shiver up your backbone, then examine your wrist for a pulse. Horror anthology followers like me will keep in mind an episode from the Nineties reboot of The Outer Limits on Showtime known as “The Sentence” by which a scientist performed by David Hyde Pierce invents a really related digital jail system that simulates a life-time sentence inside a matter of minutes. He, after all, topics himself to his personal invention that makes him consider he dedicated a homicide and served a complete lifetime in jail. He wakes up solely to begin denouncing the very system he championed only a few minutes earlier.
You possibly can watch the whole thing on YouTube without spending a dime. Somebody ought to ship it to this man.
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